Gorillas

» see gorillas.io as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Kağan Sümer grew up in Istanbul and came to Berlin by way of Bain and Rocket Internet. In May 2020 he started a company in Berlin with Jörg Kattner and Ronny Shibley. It promised groceries at a Berlin doorstep within ten minutes of the order. Gorillas ran small warehouses in central neighborhoods and employed its bike couriers directly rather than as contractors. The website said "Schneller als du", faster than you. The first orders went out in Prenzlauer Berg in the early summer of the first lockdown, and the model was the Philadelphia company goPuff with the timer turned down.

The money arrived at the speed of the deliveries. Coatue led a $44 million Series A in December 2020. In March 2021 a $290 million Series B made Gorillas a unicorn nine months after its first delivery, the fastest any German company had managed. By June there were 50 warehouses in 17 German cities and about a thousand employees. By October Delivery Hero had paid 200 million euros for eight percent of a company valued at $2.1 billion, in a round of about a billion dollars. Gorillas opened in nine countries between the Netherlands and New York. Its own blog counted about 11,000 employees in October 2022.

The economics never closed. In May 2022 Gorillas left Italy and Spain along with Denmark and Belgium in a single announcement, and cut about 300 office jobs. Investors kept it going with a bridge of about 40 million euros on the condition that it turn a profit by the end of 2023, and in September 2022 the talk was of a sale at $3 billion. On 9 December 2022 Getir, the Istanbul company that had invented the ten-minute category in 2015, bought Gorillas for about 1.2 billion euros, paid in Getir stock. The app kept its name and its red for another seventeen months.

On 29 April 2024 Getir announced it was leaving its four remaining foreign markets, Germany among them, to concentrate on Turkey. In Germany the last day was 15 May 2024. Wirtschaftswoche had already reported that both apps would disappear from Germany in mid-May, and the Dutch and British operations wound down over the same weeks. The domain now serves a placeholder saying the app "is no longer active and the service is no longer available", copyright 2026, with a stock gorilla where the wordmark used to be.

~ the dossier ~

~ the wildcat strike ~

Gorillas hired its riders as employees. That was the ethical selling point, and it was also why the labor fight happened inside the company rather than in a courtroom about contractor status. Complaints about pay and about the bikes came early. In June 2021 Berlin riders organized as the Gorillas Workers Collective and elected a committee to set up a works council, then walked out in wildcat strikes that blocked warehouses. In October 2021 the company answered by firing about 350 of them. A rider told Euronews that on the Tuesday morning "people started to get fired one by one" for having struck.

The next move was structural. From November 2021 the Berlin warehouses were spun into more than twenty separate companies called Gorillas Warehouse Operations, each with its own payroll, under a holding in Amsterdam, so that the riders of one warehouse were no longer colleagues of the next. Critics called it union busting. The company called it a franchise model. German labor sociologists went on to write about Gorillas as a case study in the platform economy, which is not the kind of footnote a startup wants.

~ what getir bought ~

By the time the deal closed, Gorillas was worth less than half of what it had been a year earlier, and the price was down from the $3 billion that had been floated in September. Getir paid in its own stock, which meant the Gorillas investors were now betting on Getir. Getir itself cut about 2,500 jobs in August 2023. When it raised money again in the last week of April 2024, the terms reportedly required the funds to be used to withdraw from the three European markets and settle them, and then to grow in Turkey. The Berlin brand had been bought as a consolidation and was sold off as a liability.

~ going home ~

The purple Getir bags on scooters are part of the street in Ankara the way the yellow cabs are part of New York, and most of the city has the app on its phone, mine included. Gorillas itself never opened in Turkey. It was the export version of an Istanbul idea, built by an Istanbul-raised founder for Berlin, and it came home only as a line on Getir's balance sheet. The company that started the ten-minute business still runs it in one country. The copy that raised more money did not survive the trip back.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »